How America's Most Admired - and Secretive - Company Really Works

(Business Plus; 223 pages; $26.99)

Not long ago, talking with an acquaintance who works at Apple, I asked about the company's famous culture of saying no.

How does it feel, I asked, to present idea after idea to one's bosses, only to be told time and again that your idea isn't good enough?

My acquaintance cast a withering look in my direction.

"How do you think it feels?"

Adam Lashinsky has spent more time getting a feel for life at Apple than most outsiders. Lashinsky, a veteran Silicon Valley reporter who is now senior editor at large for Fortune, offered a revealing glimpse of the notoriously secretive company's culture in a May article for the magazine. Relying mostly on interviews with former employees and Apple partners, Lashinsky chronicled the company's efforts to ensure its continued success, including exclusive retreats for the company's "top 100" employees and an "Apple University" to teach the company's unique culture to junior employees.

Now, in his book "Inside Apple," Lashinsky expands on the attributes that last year made Apple the world's most valuable company. It's an entertaining account that explains how other companies could emulate Apple's success - while also making clear how difficult that task would be.

By now Apple's approach to product development and marketing is well known. Lashinsky's chapter titles boil them down into succinct commands: "Embrace Secrecy." "Focus Obsessively." "Overwhelm Friends/Dominate Foes."

All of which is easier said than done. Lashinsky credits Apple's outsize success largely to co-founder Steve Jobs, a noted micromanager whom he likens to "a domineering orchestra conductor."

"The leadership structure at Apple is what allows Apple to thrive," a former product marketing executive tells Lashinsky. "You had a visionary leader and people he trusted implicitly who had a knack for executing his vision. Jobs stayed involved from beginning to end to make sure everything matched his vision. ... That's how you get discipline."

The flip side of this is a working environment notably less cheerful than you might expect from a company that places such a premium on delighting people. Unlike most Silicon Valley giants, for example, Apple doesn't provide free lunch for employees. They must also pay to use the on-campus gym.

In fact, no one Lashinsky talks to describes working at Apple as "fun," instead describing the satisfaction they derive from creating world-class products.

"Its public image, at least seen through its advertising, is whimsical and fun, yet its internal demeanor is cheerless and nose-to-the-grindstone," Lashinsky writes.

It's possible that could change under Tim Cook, who formally took the reins from Jobs in August. Lashinsky notes that one of Cook's first acts was to institute a corporate philanthropy program, matching employees' donations to nonprofits up to $10,000 a year.

With its detailed portrait of life at 1 Infinite Loop, "Inside Apple" makes a worthwhile companion to last year's best-selling "Steve Jobs," by Walter Isaacson. If Isaacson's book was the definitive biography of Apple's chief visionary, who died in October, then "Inside Apple" is a revealing guided tour of his greatest creation.

For all its behind-the-scenes revelations, though, the most striking thing about "Inside Apple" turns out to be its pessimism. Although he predicts that Apple will dominate its rivals for the next several years, over the long term Lashinsky argues that the odds are against it.

"Over the next fifteen years or so," he writes, "the business world will get to watch the drama of whether Apple truly has found a way to cheat the hangman's noose or if the period between 1997 and 2012 or so was a golden aberration driven by one extraordinary individual the likes of which we'll never see again. If the former is true, then Apple will defy almost all of business history."

But as Lashinsky himself points out, Jobs spent much of the past decade creating a road map for his successors to follow. And if nothing else, Apple can count on this fact, former Apple executive Avie Tevanian noted to Lashinsky. "When Steve is gone," Tevanian said, "the competition still will not have Steve Jobs."

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